Utility companies are used to dealing with Mother Nature during major events like hurricanes and tornadoes, but sometimes it is the little things that cause big problems.
A weekend outage in Columbia County has people asking questions about how electric utilities safeguard equipment.
Information on Sunday said a snake got into a substation, tripped the system and caused the outage.
Georgia Power spokesman John Kraft confirmed some type of wildlife caused the Sunday event.
“About 6,100 customers were briefly out of power for approximately 30 minutes, only 2,200 customers were out for 79 minutes, at which point power was restored to all,” said Kraft.
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Kraft said Georgia Power uses a number of things to guard against outages caused by animals.
“We use various types of squirrel guard protectors or other screening devices to reduce the likelihood for contacts. Other reliability investments may include making power lines and equipment more durable and resilient so they are less susceptible to tree limbs, animal contacts and weather-related outages,” Kraft explained.
He said there are also safeguards against the kind of cyber-attack that recently shut down the Colonial Pipeline and JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier.
While the company could not reveal specific security elements, Kraft said “It has allocated considerable resources to develop and implement a comprehensive program to protect critical systems to continue delivering the clean, safe, reliable and affordable energy.”
Both Colonial and JBS paid millions of dollars in ransom to the hackers.
Dana Lynn McIntyre is a Staff Reporter with The Augusta Press. You can reach her at dana@theaugustapress.com.
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